this post was submitted on 06 Aug 2023
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I have the experience, but not the energy nor passion as I am almost burned out already. I hope you find some awesome people.
If it was a paying gig would you consider it? 5 to 10 hours a week, let's say 10. What kind of salary would you expect?
Just curious.
I also have the desired skill set and experience far surpassing what theyβre asking for but not the time or energy to do this since my work already demands 60+ hours a week and on-call from me. Yes Iβm American.
To answer your pay question; around 4-500 would be the average pay for 10 hours this position in the working world. Since the fediverse instances have next to zero reliable income (donations canβt be counted as reliable) I understand this is a difficult if not impossible bill to pay. This is why theyβre asking for volunteers whose work schedule is more sane and therefore have the energy and time to commit. I wish I was available to do so, maybe if my current job search is successful at finding something more chill.
Knowing this is a volunteer project, I'd never request renumeration. If I were contracting with a large company, I guess I'd charge 300-500 per day. That's just based on quotes I get on LinkedIn, as I've never worked as a contractor. Also I couldn't have it interfere with my main job, where I'm also on call, so it would be lower priority.
I can't tell if this career path is worth the stress but you're describing a lot of money. And it makes me feel like this is worth it.
Survivorship bias. the IT market is a lot more saturated now than it was 20 years ago. This person got in somewhere good early on and rode that career train. These opportunities rarely exist today unless you arre a charismatic super talented genius. I would not bet on most people being able to ever pull those kinds of numbers before burning out. Being a money chaser is not worth it in today's world, value your health mental wellbeing and personal life equally if not more than your bank account. Live well below your means and learn how to save/invest, and find a life/career path you can feel good and satisfied in even if its not paying a whole lot. You r quality of life will skyrocket and you will have enough $ to feel secure. I worked years in industrial trade, made good cash, it wasnt worth it in the end. Just my 2 cents.
Yeah it's hard to gain the high value skillsets these days, and I think it's one of the reason those of us that have been in it for decades are able to do fine now. I got lucky where early on in my career I got in with a company that was small and had enormous growth over a 10 year span.
I'm similar paid to the person in question and am also an independant contractor. I make similar due to my experience level and rather unique combination of skills so I just cut my hours way back and typically work a few hours a day. So burnout is a non issue. I take no work where I'm on call or "first responder" and I make sure it's always written into the contract that way.
It took 25+ years of busting ass to get here, although I have no regrets, and I recognize I am incredibly lucky to have the circumstances play out this way.
Not really true. It takes a bit of knowing your worth, advocating for yourself in interviews, and job hopping as needed for pay raises every year or two while continuing to build your skills both on the job and outside of it. IT isn't an industry that lends itself to job stability and high pay if you stay in a role long term, and stagnation can certainly be a factor if you decide to stop learning things.
Also. it's still very possible to get in, but focus these days is DevOps, automation, virtualization, and more recently, AI. You won't make bank in some shitty low tier helpdesk role.
A good start would be certification path to pick up some straightforward "guaranteed to get you work" kind of certs like:
Alternately, getting a few programming languages under your belt is totally doable for free with Youtube and other online courses and then doing your own projects with public repositories on Github for prospective employers to see. Getting a foot in the door with dev is gonna be very luck of the draw though.
You definitely wont' start out making a wage that high on the Ops side, but finding a foot in the door at between $25 and $30 an hour shouldn't be hard once you get some bare minimum experience under your belt.
College grads may have an easier time, but I wouldn't know, I dropped out and went the certification/experience route some 15+ years ago.
Pick up the Oracle cert. It looks like Oracle is gonna be more valuable than RedHat for a while.
You're probably right with the bullshit going on now. IBM just loves fucking up everything it touches. You wouldn't believe the headaches all the RHEL 9 crap and the end of CentOS has caused for some of my customers. AlmaLinux seems like a decent alternative, but not sure how well it's going to be received long term.
I'll add that I don't know if there are good certs for it, but SQL admins are pretty much always in demand, and I hear that kinda thing can pay well. I knew some folks in business Intelligence (BI) that did nothing but SQL and outputting charts and data for analytics and they made bank. Seemed like a pretty neat job too, I have to admit. It's cool to take data like that and turn it into something useful for everyone else.
And having occasionally mucked around in postgres DBs, yeah, good on them. SQL can be both completely simple, and at the same time, ridiculously complex and involved, all depending on how deep down the rabbit hole you want to go. Blows my mind all the things you can do with it with so few commands.
I'd say IT sysadmin work sucks unless the company runs proper shit and has a handle on it, which is more than often beyond your influence in the position. A lot of times the company doesn't want to hire enough people, and overworking yourself will never be enough to get everything done. So you spend your days trying to handle the highest impact tasks coming from management and above, constantly being pulled in different directions, and never really feeling like you got anything meaningful accomplished. IT priorities also often conflict with business priorities, and if not handled right you will be caught in the middle of this and all your decisions will be scrutinized by the interested parties.
$300/day @ 8 hours = $37.50/hr / $78k/yr $500/day @ 8 hours = $62.50/hr / $130k/yr
Which are imo on the low end of U.S. tech salary. Considering a contractor also has overhead like healthcare, business expenses, any time spent in administration take home would potentially be lower.
The market is softer right now but will probably rebound in a couple years.
If you're in IT for the money, you're gonna hate it or yourself before long. Lagom.
Infosec is a good choice if you have the ability to think analytically and to learn new things faster than average. Demand for such jobs is probably going to be growing for a while still.
That barrier to entry is no joke tho. I'm still trying to get myself to a point where I can confidently put my hat in the ring for infosec roles
So I'm a systems engineer in the real world for an (almost) unicorn (current valuation might even have tossed us over that magic number). My salary is on the lower end of the spectrum but I'm happy with it because normally the work life balances is dandy. My total comp is well into 6 figures USD. Oh and I'm fully remote.
Now, this is not something you can get out of highschool. I've been working with Linux for 10+ years, built (and maintained) entire AD forests, have a fairly deep understanding of networking and containerization, etc.
Again. You don't start like me. You start getting a gig in front line help desk and answer questions. In your free time at work you learn (that's never going to stop). Eventually your outgrow help desk and move into some other role (and keep learning). The people who are successful in this field A) can always be learning, B) have a means to destress/avoid burnout and C) have customer service skills.
oof its like you're either me or i'm you. hope you find your way past the burn out or out of it if you end up sinking into it. i'm going on like 3.5 years of battling it and there are better days and worse days, but i have no idea what else to even do. managing infra and writing code have been my entire career up to now.
I'm about 1.5 years into it. Lost most passion for the job, but there are flashes of motivation here and there. Considering trying to move into full time development, but that would take a lot of effort. Tired of keeping up with the kubernetes ecosystem too.
Ah, alright, not quite me - I'll be 14 years deep in November. Honestly, one of the things that kept me motivated over the years was moving around - I stayed at the same company, but I started out doing QA (by hand, no automation), then got moved to handle release management, then moved to IT as a general Linux admin and spent a few years doing that, made friends with an infosec manager and he offered me a spot on his team working remote and doing container/docker security which morphed into a cloud security thing after he left the company (I hated the cloud). A couple years back I moved back to non-cloud/non-infosec work doing automation stuff with Ansible mainly, and for the time being only for our on-prem infrastructure (this may change in the future and I'm not really looking forward to it all that much).
At this point, nothing is really helping get my head back into the game 100% but I can still put out work and I'm just trying to find the joy in small victories and chasing the high you get when the code you wrote works flawlessly. I'm blessed to have a solid management structure above me who a) know me, b) like me (and the feeling is mutual, they're all great people), and c) are happy with my output.
I don't envy you working with kubernetes - my time in container security came during the early days of large companies trying to move to turning everything into microservices. It was a wild west kind of vibe and I basically had free reign... nowadays, I don't think I'd enjoy any of that in its current form.
I have great soft skills and I write pretty well, but outside of that my skillset is basically a degraded/decayed technology one because I've been treading water for a while now and not actively keeping up with all the shit in our sector that changes on a constant basis.
I've also seriously weighed moving into development, but I'm not sure if that's just going to fix anything for me. I like writing Python, but I don't know how that would feel full-time. Sucks, man.
Since July 1996 here, amateur/volunteer since ~93.
Learn the stuff that doesn't change as fast for a foundation, and go from there into stuff that tickles the coding fancy. Let the mayfly tech be handled by caffeine-addled thrill-chasers, while you just build stuff and sleep well.
That's basically where I'm wedging myself in now. Ansible and Python, higher value but lower stress projects. Bigger wins, but ones that are able take the time needed to put them together, test, and refine.
It's almost a back-to-my-roots kind of thing for me, but with a fresh twist in terms of approach. I'm basically writing automations that make life easier for ops guys, to boil it down to it's essence.
Yep. You can either do the work, or spend many times that on people to do the work in kubes.
Oof Kubernetes. Awesome community and powerful tech but the rate of change is insane. Like 6 months of CNCF is like 10 years of Red Hat + Java.